Every few quarters, the debate around Nvidia moves. For a while, it was about whether AI demand was real. Then it was about whether margins could hold. Now, heading into its August 26 earnings report, the question is whether the next product cycle can keep a company already running at this pace from slowing down.
Bank of America thinks it can. And the note behind that view is worth reading before the earnings date arrives.
In a note shared with TheStreet on August 7, Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya called Nvidia (NVDA) his top sector pick ahead of the company's fiscal Q2 FY2027 results. He expects revenue of $94 billion to $95 billion, roughly $3 billion to $4 billion above Nvidia's own $91 billion guidance. That guidance excludes any China data center compute revenue, meaning actual results could come in higher if modest shipments to that market resume. Third-quarter guidance, he says, should come in at $107 billion to $108 billion, well above the approximately $104 billion Wall Street is currently modeling.
For context, Nvidia reported Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.6 billion in May, up 85% year over year, with data center revenue of $75.2 billion. The Q2 guidance of $91 billion implied continued sequential growth. BofA's $94 billion to $95 billion estimate would extend that momentum further.
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But Arya isn't really writing about the next quarter. "The commencement of Vera Rubin next-generation chip deliveries marks the beginning of an extended upgrade cycle spanning multiple quarters," he wrote. That's the argument. Not just a beat. A new cycle.
Arya has a $350 price target on Nvidia, representing roughly 56% upside from $223.96 at the time of the note. He points out that the stock is trading at about 16 times forward earnings, its lowest valuation in roughly a decade, even as the earnings trajectory continues to rise, as TheStreet reported.
Nvidia confirmed at GTC Taipei in June that Vera Rubin has entered full production. The platform pairs Rubin GPUs with the new Vera CPU and is expected to be available from cloud partners in the second half of 2026. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle are already preparing deployments, with OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX among the first customers. Nvidia is targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power for the buildout, as TheStreet reported.
GPU spot rental prices are near all-time highs, Arya notes in the note. The B200 is running at about $5.66 per hour, the H100 at $2.80 per hour, the A100 at $1.64. That data point matters because it addresses one of the persistent doubts about the AI trade. If customers can still rent compute at those prices and make money from it, they have every reason to keep buying the next generation of hardware. The concern about return on investment fades when the rental market is this strong.
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The Vera CPU is the part of Rubin that Bank of America finds most interesting beyond the GPU story. An earlier note from the bank called it "the single greatest new addition since the GPU." Arya's current note projects Vera CPU sales in the second half of fiscal 2027 at roughly $20 billion, with an annual run rate of $50 billion or more by fiscal 2028. That trajectory, if it holds, would make Nvidia the largest server CPU vendor.
Memory cost inflation has become one of the louder concerns about Nvidia's margins. DRAM now makes up 40% to 50% of total production costs, up from 15% to 20% historically. The worry is that as Nvidia moves to more memory-intensive architectures, those rising costs eat into its famously high gross margins faster than the company can price around them.